Teen’s alleged sex scam

Of course the worst news gets the most coverage – more than 500 news outlets in the US, Canada, UK, New Zealand, India, Australia, and Bosnia Herzegovina, among other countries, turned up in a Google News search on this. But there is something to be learned even from this sex extortion story about an 18-year-old in Wisconsin, described by a "shocked" friend to a Wisconsin radio station as a "goody-two-shoes kind of guy" but accused of "posing as a female on Facebook in a plot to trick at least 31 male classmates into sending nude pictures of themselves and then using the images to blackmail them into performing sex acts, The Register in the UK reports. The takeaway is that even when the site you use is all about socializing with friends in "real life" – which is usually a pretty good protection measure – don't develop a false sense of security. Not everyone is on the up and up even in real life. The other takeaway: that this, as The Register put it, is just "the latest graphic example of the heap of trouble waiting for naive teens who send sexually explicit images of themselves over the email or text messages. Last month, six high school students in Pennsylvania were charged under state child pornography statutes for sending and receiving nude images of each other using cell phones. Last year, a 15-year old girl was arrested on felony child pornography charges for allegedly sending nude pictures of herself to classmates."